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The complex challenges facing the healthcare sector call for a revision of the ways it can provide high-quality services with economic sustainability. Revision can proceed along different pathways. Among the new paradigms of healthcare is the shift from a silo approach by hospitals towards an integrated, multidisciplinary approach. This entails restructuring hospitals in disease centres and exploring how AI can aid in the integration of hospital services and community care. Reorganization is vital to the development of patient-centred healthcare and the holistic approach. To achieve these goals, healthcare and policy decision-makers need to consider both the administrative and the clinical aspects of everyday issues. AI can play a key role in helping balance this duality. The overarching objective is to create interdisciplinary therapeutic and diagnostic pathways within care networks shared between the hospital and the community. This involves the analysis of huge amounts of data and interdisciplinary knowledge beyond the grasp of an individual. Therefore, knowing how AI can help in the development and reorganization of community healthcare is essential for clinical leaders to take advantage of this enormous opportunity in larger settings.

To analyze the quality of transitional care for patients with COVID-19 at discharge from Brazilian university hospitals.

A cross-sectional descriptive study was carried out in five Brazilian university hospitals between April and December 2021. The sample consisted of 527 participants. Data collection consisted of a sociodemographic questionnaire and the Care Transitions Measure (CTM-15), a care transition assessment instrument, which was translated and validated in Portuguese.

Most participants were patients (n = 369; 70.0%), with primary school completion (n = 218; 43.4%), multiracial (n = 218; 43.5%) and with an income of up to two minimum wages (n = 182; 42.8%). Dimension 1 – management preparation – obtained the highest score (71.2 points, SD = 16.5), while Dimension 4 – care plan – obtained the lowest score (62.2 points, SD = 23.4). Among the participating hospitals, there was a difference in the overall mean with results ranging from 67.0 to 72.9 points.

A satisfactory quality of care transition was found, considering the context of a pandemic. The main weaknesses in the care transitions were related to the care planning after hospital discharge.

Healthcare has undergone multiple phases in gaining understanding, accepting and implementing quality and safety, with the last 3 decades being crucial and decisive in making progress. During that time, safety has always been quoted along with quality, but the cost of error in healthcare (both in human lives and monetary cost) has been continuing to rise.

This article discusses the authors’ expert perspective in comparison to the industry’s research and practice outputs.

Healthcare has not yet defined quality and safety. This is allowing the misconception that already established quality management systems (QMSs) are fit for safety purposes as well. Even though aviation has acted as a paradigm for healthcare, further alignment in embedding safety management systems (SMS) has yet to be realised.

In this paper, the distinct nature of safety and its detachment of quality is being discussed, along with the need for clear and safety specific processes. Setting common language is the first step in establishing appropriate safety processes within SMSs, operating in tandem with QMSs, to promote patient safety successfully.

Ageing is associated with multi-morbidity, polypharmacy and medication-related harm (MRH). There is limited published literature on MRH in older Egyptian adults. This study aims to determine the incidence and risk factors associated with MRH in an Egyptian cohort of older patients in the 8-weeks period after hospital discharge.

This study recruited 400 Egyptian patients, aged = ≥ 60 years from 3 hospitals in Cairo and followed them up 8 weeks after discharge using a semi-structured telephone interview to verify MRH events (type, probability, severity and preventability) and related factors.

The participants’ ages ranged from 60 to 95 years with 53% females. In the final cohort of 325 patients analyzed, MRH occurred in 99 patients (incidence of 30.5%), of which 26 MRH cases (26.2%) were probable, serious and preventable. MRH included adverse drug reactions (ADRs), non-adherence and medication errors. Multivariate regression analysis showed that non-adherence and inappropriate prescription had highly significant association with MRH (P < 0.001), history of previous ADR, living alone and presence of paid caregiver had significant association (P 0.008, 0.012, 0.02 respectively), while age, medications number, length of stay (LOS) and cognitive impairment were not significantly associated with MRH.

These findings demonstrate the magnitude of MRH in Egypt affecting almost a third of older adults after leaving the hospital. These original data could guide decision-makers to enhance older patients’ medication safety through education, quality improvement and policy.

MRH in Egyptian older adults post-hospital discharge has not been adequately reported in scientific literature.

This study investigates the pathways for adopting IoTs and BDA technologies to improve healthcare management.

The study relied on 445 healthcare professionals' perspectives to explore different causal pathways to IoTs and BDA adoption and usage for daily healthcare management. The Fussy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis was adopted to explore the underlying pathways for healthcare management.

The empirical analysis revealed six different configural paths influencing the acceptance and use of IoTs and BDA for healthcare improvement. Two key user topologies from the six configural paths, digital literacy and ease of use and social influence and behavioural intentions, mostly affect the paths for using digital health technologies by healthcare physicians.

Despite this study's novel contributions, limitations include the fsQCA methodology, perceptual data and the context of the study. The fsQCA methodology is still evolving with different interpretations, although it reveals new insights and as such further studies are required to explain the configural paths of social phenomena. Additionally, future research should consider other constructs beyond the UTAUT and digital literacy to illustrate configural paths to healthcare technology acceptance and usage. Again, the views of healthcare professionals are perceptual data. Hence future research on operational data will support significant contributions towards pathways to accept and use emerging technologies for healthcare improvement. Lastly, this study is from a developing country perspective where emerging digital healthcare technology is still emerging to support healthcare management. Hence, more investigation from other cross-country analyses of configural paths for digital technology deployment in healthcare will enhance the conversation with IoTs and BDA for healthcare management.

Holistically, the acceptance and use of healthcare technologies and platforms is not solely on their capabilities, but a combination of distinct factors driven by users' perspectives. This offers healthcare administrators and institutions to essentially reflect on the distinct combinations of conditions favourable to health professionals who can use IoTs and BDA for healthcare improvement.

This study is among the few scholarly works to empirically investigate the configural paths to support healthcare improvement with emerging technologies. Using fsQCA is a unique contribution to existing information system literature for configural paths for healthcare improvement with emerging digital technologies.

This paper aims to examine the association between the dietary inflammatory index, the consumption of Enteral Nutrition Supplemented with probiotics with certain serum inflammation markers and gastrointestinal complications among individuals diagnosed with COVID-19.

This cross-sectional investigation involved 100 COVID-19 patients who were admitted to intensive care units in hospitals. These patients were administered two different types of Enteral Nutrition, so the dietary inflammatory index (DII), gastrointestinal complications and some serum inflammation markers have been compared between two groups.

The mean DII scores in all patients were significantly pro-inflammatory (probiotic formula 2.81 ± 0.01 vs usual formula group 2.93 ± 0.14 p = 0.19). The probiotic formula consumption had an inverse association with High-sensitivity C-reactive Protein concentration (coef = −3.19, 95% CI −1.25, −5.14 p = 0.001) and lead to a reduction of 2.14 mm/h in the serum level of Erythrocyte sedimentation rate compared to normal formula. The incidence of diarrhea, abdominal pain and vomiting in probiotic formula patients was respectively 94%, 14% and 86% less than in usual formula patients (p = 0.05).

In this cross-sectional study for the first time, the authors found that probiotic formula consumption was inversely associated with serum inflammation markers and gastrointestinal complications incidence. The high DII leads to more gastrointestinal complications incidence and inflammation markers. More studies are needed to prove this relationship.

Drawing on interviews with two types of essential workers – wound clinicians and care workers – the chapter examines stigma management in dirty care work through the lens of emotion management. The study combines two dimensions of dirty work: physical taint in relation to bodywork and social taint linked to working in close proximity to socially stigmatized clients. Hence, stigma management extends to dealing with the physically and socially dirty features of essential care work. In addition, the authors’ assessment of social stigma includes how essential care workers also sought to alleviate the social stigma encountered by their clients. In so doing, the authors extend the literature on dirty work to identify how emotion management skills are central to the stigma management strategies of the essential care workers in this study. The authors demonstrate how both groups deal with their stigma by emphasizing the emotion management skills in ‘doing’ dirty work and in the ‘purpose’ of this work, which includes acknowledging how the authors attempt to address the social taint encountered by their clients. Additionally, by comparing two occupations with different contexts and conditions of work, the authors show how complex emotion management skills are gendered in care work to expand the understanding of gender and stigma management. Furthermore, these emotion management skills emanate from the deep relational work with clients rather than through occupational communities. The authors argue that by focussing on emotion management, the hidden skills of dirty work in gendered care work are illuminated and contribute to contemporary debates about whether stigma can be overcome.

In recent years, investing with robo-advisors has gained momentum and is seen as a simplifying approach for individual investors to participate in financial markets. This chapter contributes to a better understanding of the concept of a robo-advisory and its implications for private investors by discussing its past, present, and future. It explores key issues, like cost-efficiency, historical performance, and automation levels, based on research and industry insights. Moreover, this chapter examines a robo-advisor's benefits, limitations, and challenges, like behavioral biases, regulation, and risk profiling. Finally, the importance of the ongoing megatrends of AI and green investing is examined concerning a robo-advisory.

This papers aims to study lattice structures in terms of geometric variables, manufacturing variables and material-based variants and their correlation with compressive behaviour for their application in a methodology for the design and development of personalized elastic therapeutic products.

Lattice samples were designed and manufactured using extrusion-based additive manufacturing technologies. Mechanical tests were carried out on lattice samples for elasticity characterization purposes. The relationships between sample stiffness and key geometric and manufacturing variables were subsequently used in the case study on the design of a pressure cushion model for validation purposes. Differentiated areas were established according to patient’s pressure map to subsequently make a correlation between the patient’s pressure needs and lattice samples stiffness.

A substantial and wide variation in lattice compressive behaviour was found depending on the key study variables. The proposed methodology made it possible to efficiently identify and adjust the pressure of the different areas of the product to adapt them to the elastic needs of the patient. In this sense, the characterization lattice samples turned out to provide an effective and flexible response to the pressure requirements.

This study provides a generalized foundation of lattice structural design and adjustable stiffness in application of pressure cushions, which can be equally applied to other designs with similar purposes. The relevance and contribution of this work lie in the proposed methodology for the design of personalized therapeutic products based on the use of individual lattice structures that function as independent customizable cells.

Arthroscopic osteochondroplasty is a minimally invasive procedure that has been used to treat femoroacetabular impingement syndrome, leading to significant improvements in patients’ clinical outcomes and quality of life. However, some studies suggest that inadequate bone resection can substantially alter hip biomechanics. These modifications may generate different contact profiles and higher contact forces, increasing the risk of developing premature joint degeneration. To improve control over bone resection and biomechanical outcomes during arthroscopic osteochondroplasty surgery, this study aims to present a novel system for measuring femoroacetabular contact forces.

Following a structured design process for the development of medical devices, the steps required for its production using additive manufacturing with material extrusion and easily accessible sensors are described. The system comprises two main devices, one for measuring femoroacetabular contact forces and the other for quantifying the force applied by the assistant surgeon during lower limb manipulation. The hip device was designed for use within an arthroscopic environment, eliminating the need for additional portals.

To evaluate its performance, the system was first tested in a laboratory setup and later under in-service conditions. The 3D printing parameters were tuned to ensure the watertighness of the device and sustain the intraoperative fluid pressures. The final prototype allowed for the controlled measurement of the hip contact forces in real-time.

Using additive manufacturing and readily available sensors, the present work presents the first device to quantify joint contact forces during arthroscopic surgeries, serving as an additional tool to support the surgeon’s decision-making process regarding bone resection.